Teachers, tech sector join forces to help students create new apps

OTTAWA — Teachers and the city’s technology sector have teamed up to create a new mentoring program that will see high school students develop educational applications and get a taste for life as a computer programmer.

The unique initiative, thought to be the first of its kind in Canada, brings together students and teachers from all four school boards in Ottawa, and employees from nearly a dozen high-tech companies.

Students in Grade 3 will dream up applications for use on tablet computers that the high school students will then develop under the guidance of their teachers. The industry mentors will visit the Grade 10 classrooms once a week and work alongside students, helping them overcome development hurdles and bringing real-world knowledge and perspective on what it means to work in the tech industry right into the classroom.

“I try to relate what their being taught in the classroom to what they’ll be doing in the real world,” said Jose de Leon, who works for the software developer OpenPlus and mentors students at Sir Wilfrid Laurier Secondary School in Orléans.

De Leon grew up in the east end and said he was among the first high school students in Ottawa to do a co-op placement in the technology sector. That was back in 1990. So when he returned to Ottawa in 2010, he jumped at the chance to get involved in the mentorship program, which was created by the Ottawa Network for Education.

He says he wants to give the next generation the same chance he had.

“It set up a lot of future opportunities for me.”

École secondaire catholique Garneau teacher Patrick Pichette said the program will expose his 25 teenage students to potential career opportunities and help them decide if programming is a career they might like to pursue.

“This project is perfectly geared to helping them understand the developing process,” he said.

Teacher Patrick Coxall agreed, adding the arrangement pushes student learning far beyond the textbook. Students at Mother Teresa Catholic High School will work in small groups to create a product that must satisfy their younger peers, which is different than him simply assigning a project.

“Now that they have a customer, it makes a real difference,” Coxall said.

His Grade 10 computer programming students have already met with the Grade 3 class at a nearby St. Luke School.

One of the applications under development is inspired by the classic game Pac-Man, and will see the hungry yellow mouth eat letters that the younger students will then have to arrange in order to spell certain words.

Learning to write and fix code, solve technical issues and work collaboratively are among the lessons the Grade 10s will take away, Coxall said.

“This is not only new to Ottawa, but no one else is doing this anywhere,” he said.

The TechU.me mentorship was launched as a pilot project in three schools last year. But thanks to about $1 million in funding from the federal government and support from industry partners Adobe, RIM, IBM and Macadamian, it has been expanded to include 16 elementary and 16 secondary schools.